On Christmas, as we were getting food ready at my in-laws, my wife brought me a package that had arrived at our mailbox. That package contained my copy of Try the Beetle Milk, an adventure written for Cairn by Em Quintanillo.
I’d bought the adventure a while back, and had read it on my tablet a bunch of times before now, but the physical copy is really cool to have in my hands. The glossy thick cover and the heavy stock of the interior pages are just great.
Premise
The Rag-Bat has razed the valley and rules it as a tyrant while slurping down beetles. The jar of beetle milk the Rag-Bat was going to have as a snack has been cursed with sentience and has made a run for it. Without the Milk, the Rag-Bat is done for.
The premise is absolutely bonkers, but honestly, that’s what drew me in. It’s a weird premise that gets the party into this weird valley to chat with weird people and do weird things. It is completely my jam.
The adventure is presented as a pointcrawl with many details of the adventure randomly rolled at the start. This could let you run it multiple times with the same group and get different settings and adventures each time.
Package
The book is about 30 pages long, including the material printed on the inside cover. it is illustrated in full color with Em’s artwork.
Like I said above, the soft cover is nice and thick and glossy. The internal pages are also thick stock.
My copy of the book also came with some extra goodies, though that may have been because I pre-ordered the physical copy. I got three Cairn character sheets with full-color illustrations on them. The character sheets also have the Player Principles section from the Cairn rules on the back. They look super useful but also in the sort of too nice to actually use way.
In addition to the character sheets, my copy also came with a copy of Em’s Lowly Rollers, a collection of some starter packages for Cairn that add a little bit of weirdness to your characters, which I think would match real well with the adventure itself.
Lastly, there’s a bookmark with a little procedure for getting words to populate a spark table and come up with ideas for your game.
All of it is really cool and completely made my day when it showed up.
Things I Enjoyed
As mentioned already, I love the art in this book. It’s weird and fantastic; it really gets the vibe going for the weird adventure presented.
The tone of the writing is also a complete match for the adventure. There’s a section at the beginning talking about the time it takes to travel between locations talking about travel taking “one hour by ill-fated balloon.” This is the sort of detail that gets added in passing throughout the whole adventure.
I really like the relics that are listed, especially the “Bad Advice Box” a box which “dispenses the worst possible advice about how to handle the situation.” Magic items like this which are of dubious direct utility to players but just beg for a creative use to be thought up by a clever player are my absolute favorite.
Things I Didn’t Enjoy As Much
While I like the idea that this could be replayed and be different each time, there might be a few too many things left to a die roll when the players arrive that I then need to react to the roll. If you completely object to the “Quantum Ogre”, some of the randomness here may not be your cup of beetle milk.
Final Thoughts
I really like this one. The art is bright and colorful and evocative. It gives me ideas about what’s going on in places and what’s going on with characters. The writing is really vibrant as well with small bits of word choice used to paint the picture just right. And it’s weird. I love weird in my RPGs.
Where to Find
You can get your own copy of Try the Beetle Milk for $10 at Em’s itch.io.
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